​For those who like to look at the calendar for such things, today is the 80th  anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944.  I thought it would therefore be especially appropriate to post this video.  It's the wonderful theme to the movie, The Longest Day, sung and performed most appropriately by the Cadet Glee Club of West Point, along with military band.
 
I first posted this video five years ago in 2017.  It’s my favorite one on the subject – not just for the performance, but for how movingly the video is edited.  It's particularly well-done, beginning with a minute of General Dwight Eisenhower's message to the troops before the invasion began, and interspersed with some excellent photos and archival film from the day, amid the soaring music.
 
By the way, the timpani you hear before the song begins is not only recognizable as the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but more to the point, it's the Morse Code for “V” for Victory.
 
Also, in case you weren't aware, the main theme for The Longest Day, used throughout the film not just in the end titles, was written by pop-star heartthrob at the time, Paul Anka.

I will only add that today commemorates when the United States and democracies around the world came together to fight and defeat Nazis and fascism.

About 10 days ago, history documentarian Ken Burns gave the commencement address at Brandeis University.  It got a great deal of attention for Burns acknowledging that he was going to break his long-held position of impartiality and then speaking out bluntly against Trump in the coming election (though not referencing him by name, but through what's at stake and the reasons for it).

Interestingly, the passage on the election only lasts 90 seconds, in a 21-minute speech.  What is interesting, as well, is that not only is the entire speech beautifully eloquent and thoughtful, but it's critical for those 90 seconds because it puts them all in context.  In explaining what is important about history and why, it makes clear without proselytizing what is so important about the November election.  And why.

The only line I want to quote from the speech has nothing to do with what brought it so much attention -- and, in fact, has little to do on the surface with much of the speech.  It comes near the end, as a sort of coda.  But it's the sensibility of the line that permeates through the speech.  And gets a surprised, burst of reaction for it being unexpected in its perspective for where it goes.  He says, "Insist that we support science and the arts.  Especially the arts.  They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country.  They just make our country worth defending."

If you haven't seen the speech, it's extremely good, involving, with good storytelling, thoughtful insists, and even moments of humor.

I periodically watch the PBS series, Finding Your Roots, hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, who is a history professor at Harvard and director of the university’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.  Each episode has two celebrity guests, and the research staff tracks down their ancestry.  But sometimes, even when I don’t watch I’ll record the show and fast-forward to my favorite part (and I suspect the favorite part of many viewers).  That’s when they’ve taken a DNA sample from the guests and compare it to the DNA samples previous guests on the show have given.  And see if there’s a distant match.  (It’s been on for about 10 years, so they’ve had a lot of guests.)  It’s a lot of fun when there’s a match – seeing the reaction -- and occasionally the matches are pretty amazing.
 
One of the funding organizations of the show is Ancestry.com, which put together a highlight real of just some of the “match moments.”
 
Semi-related side note:  You may recall that back during the Obama Administration, a well-regarded black man was entering his home in his well-to-do neighborhood – when he was detained by a policeman.  It got confrontational, and because it was so high-profile, President Obama brought to two men together to the White House for beers and to talk.  The man wrongly-detained, trying to get into his own home, was Henry Louis Gates.

Ben Franklin was born on this day, January 17, in 1706.  And as I like to do to celebrate, I thought I'd post a few songs with the good fellow from a couple of Broadway musicals.  Yes, a couple -- there are two musicals I know of that feature Benjamin Franklin, which is probably two more than most people would have guessed for a very long time.

While I'm certain that 1776 comes first to mind for most people, instead we're going to start with another.  It's a show that opened in October, 1964, called Ben Franklin in Paris.  And it had an impressive lead -- Robert Preston, in his first musical since The Music Man.  It had music and lyrics by a fellow named Sidney Michaels and also starred Ulla Sallert.  The show didn't have a long run, though did play for 215 performances, which is half a year.

I'm not bowled over by the score, but it does have a few nice things in it.  And happily, my favorite song even has video of it when the cast appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and performed the song and the scene that leads into it.  This is "Half the Battle."

​It shouldn’t come as a shock that the Republican Party is having a difficult time this week with slavery.  After all, when your party leader is a racist who enables White Supremacist groups and has said that there are “many fine people” among the neo-Nazia, and begins echoing Adolf Hitler, and the base of your party is filled with White Supremacists, neo-Nazis and your standard, garden variety racists, and several Republican-led states have blocked the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” in their high schools and grade schools (a college-level subject, not taught in any high school or grade school), and even blocked teaching Black history classes, and with the Republican Party morphing into fascism – of which one of the core tenets is xenophobia and hatred of all minorities -- then not knowing how to deal with slavery in order not to offend your base just isn’t something that comes amazingly out of the blue.
 
So, that brought us Nikki Haley being asked about what she believed caused the Civil War and telling her Town Hall meeting that it was really all about “Freedom.”
 
Now, clearly Nikki Haley knows that the Civil War is not about “Freeeeeedom!”, but rather about slavery. She had the Confederate flag removed from the South Carolina capitol building, after all, when she was governor.  But when talking to your party’s voters, you just can’t afford to offend the base.  Even when it comes to saying that slavery is very bad.

(My favorite moment was not her woeful explanation, but after her questioner expresses surprise that in 2023 she didn't even mention slavery, to which she asks, "What do you want me to say about slavery??"  And he answers, "I'm not running for president.")
 
And she made it worse the next day when, after having a lot of time to think about how to stop the ridicule, she pretty much doubled-down and said that, while it’s a given that the Civil War was about slavery, it’s about so much more today, like “Freeeeedom!” and government and individual rights, saying that that’s what she was supposedly referring to, about what it means today.  Except…
 
Well, except that that wasn’t what she was asked.  She was asked very simply what was the cause of the Civil War.  And the thing is, even if you’re going to address what it means today, it’s certainly not about “Freeeeeedom!” (unless you mean the freedom of slaves), and it is still about slavery at its foundation.  And of course, slavery isn't about "individual rights," but the collective subjugation of a people.
 
She also made it worse later still, insisting that the question had been asked by a “Democratic plant.”  My immediate thought was that it’s pretty embarrassing if you can get tripped up by a Ficus.  Though in fairness, a Democratic Ficus was known to be especially wily.  That aside, even if this had been a sneaky Democrat who somehow got into the event and asked a “gotcha” question, if you want to be President of the United States, you had better be able a question – most especially if it’s as easy as “What caused the Civil War?”  A question most six-graders can answer.
 
By the way, “Gotcha” questions have become a big bugaboo the Republican officials ever since Sarah Palin was running for vice-president and asked what newspapers and magazines she read that informed her views.  And she got stumped, answering “All of them” and then later complaining about how unfair the question was.

(It should also be noted that as much as Nikki Haley  wants to blame this on Democratic vegetation, this isn't even a case of "gotcha" at all, since it's not the first time Nikki Haley has addressed this.  Video has since surface from 2010 when she's talking about the Civil War, and explaining that it was about a conflict between "tradition" and "change."  No mention of slavery.)
 
The Civil War is a complex issue.  And there’s certainly more involved with it than just slavery.  But slavery is the foundation of all the issues.  Which is why it’s, as Nikki Haley herself said, “a given.”

But still she’s gone on and on, defending her words to even more TV cameras.  Here’s the problem with that – every day that goes by with Nikki Haley doubling down explaining why she was right saying the Civil War was about "FREEEEDOM," rather than slavery is a disaster for her. After all, if it's a "given" the cause of the Civil War was slavery (which it is, as she herself has "of course" noted)...then say that.  And stop.
 
The only remaining question for her about this is if it will affect the possibility of her being selected to be Trump's VP running mate.  On the one hand, it’s become such an awful issue for her (that she keeps making worse) that it’s become an almost disqualifying distraction.  On the other hand, not saying that that the Civil War was caused by slavery but is about “Freeeedom!” might be a positive in today’s Republican Party.
 
And given the problems that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) caused for himself when he brought up slavery on Sunday – perhaps in defense of Nikki Haley, perhaps because (being a Republican) he thought this was a good thing.
 
Cotton left a series of tweets trying to make the cool point that it was Democrats who actually supported slavery and caused the United States to split, when it was a Republican president who had to keep the country together.  And Democrats who still want to tear the country apart.
 
Apparently Cotton felt that when you write on social media, only your racist base can see it, not realizing that everyone can read what you’ve written, including those who understand actual history and reality.  And he was scathingly excoriated.
 
Actually, I thought there was at least one positive to come from Cotton’s effort – it showed that learning history of 160 years ago was A Good Thing.  And especially learning Black History.
 
After all, Cotton was correct about the Civil War.  The Southern states that defended slavery and seceded 160 years ago were, indeed, Democrats.  What Cotton left out was that the Democratic Party learned from his horrible mistakes and became aggressive defenders of civil rights for Black people, and that those conservative Democrats who refused to support this quit the party and became Republicans!  And this happened as long ago as 1948 when the “Dixiecrats” were outraged by Democrats putting a civil rights plank in their party platform, and many walked out of the convention.  And has become the base of the Republican Party since.  In 1964, Mississippi Democrats walked out of the Democratic convention when a Black slate was going to be admitted.  And in 1968, the switchover became pretty much completed when Richard Nixon had his “Southern Strategy,” going full racist, and the South became pretty much Republican.  And has been so since.  For the math-challenged, that’s 75 years since the Dixiecrats walked away.
 
And this week doesn’t even include earlier when Ron DeSantis explained the Florida education standard that there were “benefits” to slaves, thanks to the skills they learned while under inhumane captivity.
 
So, no, Republicans today don’t seem to have come to grips with how to deal with slavery as A Bad Thing so that they don’t offend their base.
 
Oh, and as for Cotton’s other whimsical suggestion, it was Republicans who were the Insurrectionists that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and tried to overthrow the government.  Perhaps Cotton missed the story, but it was in all the papers.  And it’s been Republicans who have continued to defend the fascist Trump’s insistence to perpetuate this divisive lie that the election was rigged and stolen.
 
In the end, if we’ve learned anything from all this, it’s just really, really hard to defend the indefensible.  The only hope is that, among the “we” referenced here who have learned this incredibly easy and basic lesson of life, it includes Republicans.

Don’t hold your breath on that.  But miracles are possible.

​I wrote about this piece of remarkable TV history back in 2014, and it remains one of my favorites.  Though there's some background music in it, it's not about music at all, but it will nonetheless fit in perfectly for Holiday Music Fest, mainly on the Fest part.  Back in my initial posting on this site about Kukla, Fran and Ollie, I wrote about how the show's brilliant creator, puppeteer Burr Tillstrom won an additional Emmy Award that was not involved with KF&O, but for his work on his own.  It was for one of the "hand ballets" that he performed on occasion for the satirical news series, That Was the Week That Was.  

That Was the Week That Was was a smart, pointed, very sharp British sketch-comedy show which was brought over to the U.S. in the early 1960s.  Among other things, it introduced to American audiences one of the original British cast members, David Frost.  It's also the show that introduced Tom Lehrer to most Americans.  He wrote periodic songs for the series, and then recorded them for his now-classic hit album, That Was the Year That Was.

And it also brought Burr Tillstrom into the national spotlight in a way people hadn't seen or expected.

His hand ballets were little vignettes that didn't use any puppets at all, but merely Tillstrom's bare hands, using them alone to evoke some story in the news he wanted to get across.  It was done with great artistry, often movingly.  And one of them so artistic and moving that it won him an Emmy Award.

In 1963, two years after the Berlin Wall had been erected, a very brief concession was made.  The Wall would open for the Christmas holiday and allow those in the West to travel into East Berlin and visit family and loved ones, needing to return a few days later.

This is what Burr Tillstrom did a hand ballet about shortly after.  And --

-- I found the video of it!  It is one of the favorite videos I've been able to find.  I'm thrilled.

The quality of the video is a little rough, especially at the beginning, but it's fine.  And ultimately, as you watch -- one brilliant artist using only his hands -- the quality of the video won't matter one whit.  

And if anyone ever wonders where the humanity of Kukla, Fran and Ollie came from, to bring such life into puppets, now you'll know.

When I posted this one year, I got a perturbed note from a reader who found nothing worthwhile about the video, and took me to task for wasting his time.  In the spirit of the season, I will again refrain from anything ad hominen in return.  I will just say that I feel completely comfortable in recognizing the legend of this piece, and anything else is an understandable matter of personal taste.  Wherever that may lie.  I say this knowing that it's not just my opinion on this, but also the opinion of the members of the Television Academy who voted Tillstrom the Emmy Award.

But to be fair, I guess I should add a disclaimer.  If anyone doesn't like old black-and-white video or just looking at hands for three minutes, or politics and history, or quiet, thoughtful, emotional storytelling with the sparsest of action or jokes, centered instead on pure artistry, I get it, and so by all means avoid this.

For everyone else, here it is.  The video calls it "Burr Tillstrom's 'Berlin Wall.'"  For me, I think of it as "The Burr-lin Wall".
​